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I had an idea for a wave project that I was going to build. I requested and received a dev and test account and played about with the UI. I managed to get the openfire extension installed on my server, the google appspot account setup, a particular non-repo version of eclipse and the GWT extension (on one version of Ubuntu). I built a crude robot (the logic) and a gadget (the UI), uploaded it and saw it working. If I bought a SSL cert I could have federated so that the robot code ran on my server (as my app would have needed to do).

I liked that it was an extension to XMPP. I liked a lot about the direction google took the project. Yes, the UI was flakey at the time (last year) and I had my doubts about how federation would scale. The thing I was waiting for was some server-side code for the web part of a federated server to be made available.

I put in quite a bit of effort to get that far and had faith in google's faith in the platform. I'm surprised wave has been pulled and I'm sure developers that put in more work than I will feel let down. It is not often that google cancels a product, especially such a large one that has had so much work thrown at it. I believe the idea was a good one, that it flowed from naturally XMPP and hope it flourishes in a FLOSS way in the future.

Lord Byron Eee PC writes "Newsweek is carrying a navel-gazing piece on how wrong they were when in 1995 they published a story about how the Internet would fail. The original article states, 'Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.' The article continues to say that online shopping will never happen, that airline tickets won't be purchased over the web, and that newspapers have nothing to fear. It's an interesting look back at a time when the Internet was still a novelty and not yet a necessity."

coondoggie writes "Computer users with rudimentary skills will be able to program via screen shots rather than lines of code with a new graphical scripting language called Sikuli that was devised at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With a basic understanding of Python, people can write programs that incorporate screen shots of graphical user interface (GUI) elements to automate computer work. One example given by the authors of a paper about Sikuli is a script that notifies a person when his bus is rounding the corner so he can leave in time to catch it."
Here's a video demo of the technology, and a paper explaining the concept (PDF).

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."

accido writes "As reported by The LA Times, Google has now decided to expand its marketing and data collection to include what you watch on your Tivo. The data collected would help Google, who sells TV ads, show who watches which commercials and who skips right over them. The article outlines how this could be bad for networks that cash in whether you watch the ad or not. Does this mean fewer commercials for viewers? Not likely, but one can hope."

The pressure difference theory accounts for only a fraction of the generated lift. The majority comes from the the reaction from deflecting the air downwards.

Laminar flow causes the air to stick to the top of the wing and is redirected slightly downwards, the underside pushes yet more air downwards in a more obvious way. The vertical component of this is what generates most of the lift.

Glyn Moody writes "Not content with snooping on all Internet activity, the UK government now wants to introduce changes to the contentious EU Telecoms Package, which will kill net neutrality in the EU: 'Amendments to the Telecoms Package circulated in Brussels by the UK government, seek to cross out users' rights to access and distribute Internet content and services. And they want to replace it with a "principle" that users can be told not only the conditions for access, but also the conditions for the use of applications and services. The amendments, if carried, would reverse the principle of end-to-end connectivity which has underpinned not only the Internet, but also European telecommunications policy, to date.' To add to the irony, an accompanying text cuts and pastes from Wikipedia, without attribution."